Bogardus' New Paper on Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Bogardus, Tomas. "Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument", Ethics (forthcoming).  

The paper aims to make trouble for naturalists, arguing that, given the facts of evolution, they should abandon moral realism, accept a rationalism in tension with naturalism, or give up naturalism. In this way, it brings out an apparent epistemological tension between atheism and moral realism.

Buckareff & Nagawa's Alternative Conceptions of God...

...is now out, and looks to be an excellent volume on a sorely neglected topic. The book is in keeping with the important new trend of doing philosophy of religion in a way that's unmoored from Christianity. I look forward to giving it a careful read.

CfP: SCP Eastern Regional Meeting

Eastern Regional Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers 

Thursday, September 24th through Saturday, September 26th, 2015, Messiah College

Featuring a debate about the existence of God

Paul Draper (Purdue University)

Robin Collins (Messiah College)

Robin Collins will offer a new argument based on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. He will argue that the universe has been finely tuned to optimize the discoverability of physical laws and entities, which neither random chance, nor the multiverse can explain. Paul Draper will construct a pro tanto case against orthodox theism based on its immodesty and on its poor fit with a variety of known facts about pleasure and pain, love and hate, autonomy and heteronomy, achievement and failure, and virtue and vice. Collins and Draper will each respond to the other’s presentations.

Conference Theme: The Existence of God 

The theme should be interpreted broadly. It includes not only arguments for or against the existence of God, but a variety of other issues including, for example, questions about the nature of existence as it relates to God and the epistemology of theism.

Call for Papers

Submissions exploring any topic of interest to Christian philosophers are welcome, particularly those that relate to the conference theme. Christian and non-Christian philosophers are encouraged to submit papers. Submissions should be 3,000 words or less and prepared for blind review (please send a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file with no identifying ‘marks’). Include a cover letter with your name, institutional affiliation, email address, paper title, and an abstract of 150 words or less. Submissions are due by July 15, 2015. Please send your paper toPhilosophyconference@yahoo.com. If you do not receive an e-mail acknowledgement within one week of your submission please re-submit. 

The SCP offers a $500 prize for the best graduate student paper. For a paper to be eligible, it must be submitted by July 15, 2015. The $500 award will be presented publicly at the conference. If you are a graduate student and would like your paper to be considered for the prize, please indicate that you are a graduate student in your submission email.

Thanks to Justin Schieber for the pointer.

Another Worry for The Value of Freedom in Free Will Theodicies

In "What's So Good About Moral Freedom?" (The Philosophical Quarterly, 2000), Wes Morriston pointed out a tension between saying that significant freedom is a great good (in virtue of being a prerequisite for moral goodness) while denying that God himself is significantly free (which seems required to rule out possible worlds in which God freely does wrong).  However, some (Hick et al.) argue that significant freedom is valuable for another reason, viz., that it's a prerequisite for the best sorts of personal relationships. In particular, love has more value if it's freely chosen, where this involves the possibility of the beloved rejecting the offer of love. Could Morriston's objection thus be sidestepped by rejecting Plantinga's account of the value of significant freedom while accepting Hick's account?

It seems to me that the answer is "no", and for the same sorts of reasons raised by Morriston. So, for example, consider the relationships the members of the trinity are supposed to have with one another. These are loving relationships among persons that are morally perfect and perfectly loving essentially. Prima facie, then, there is no possible world in which one member of the trinity spurns the relationship of any other member. Therefore, it looks as though the members of the trinity lack significant freedom with respect to the loving relationships between them. Therefore, Hick's account seems to entail that the members of the trinity love each other in a way that's inferior to the best kind of love.

A similar worry arises for love between God and human beings. For if God is morally perfect and perfectly loving essentially, then even if we have significant freedom with respect to choosing to love God, God does not have significant freedom with respect to choosing to love us. But if that's right, then there is a significant sense in which the kind of love God can offer us is inferior to the kind of love we can offer him.

In short, there's a prima facie case to be made that a Hickian account of the value of freedom fares no better than the Plantingian account.

Schwitzgebel on the Immortal's Dilemma

Here.

Stephen Law's New Paper on Skeptical Theism

The Pandora’s box objection to skeptical theism

Stephen Law

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-15 (forthcoming)

Abstract 

Skeptical theism is a leading response to the evidential argument from evil against the existence of God. Skeptical theists attempt to block the inference from the existence of inscrutable evils to gratuitous evils by insisting that given our cognitive limitations, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were God-justifying reasons we can’t think of. A well-known objection to skeptical theism is that it opens up a skeptical Pandora’s box, generating implausibly wide-ranging forms of skepticism, including skepticism about the external world and past. This paper looks at several responses to this Pandora’s box objection, including a popular response devised by Beaudoin and Bergmann. I find that all of the examined responses fail. It appears the Pandora’s box objection to skeptical theism still stands.

And if a copy should find its way to my inbox...

UPDATE: Thanks!

In Memoriam: Michael L. Martin

Michael L. Martin died unexpectedly in Boston on Wednesday evening, aged 83. He made a very large contribution to atheistic scholarship. His books included the following. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1991); The Case against Christianity (1993); The Big Domino in the Sky (1996); Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (2002); The Impossibility of God (2003); The Improbability of God (2006); and The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2006).

(Thanks to Graham Oppy for alerting me to this.)